Lathe of Heaven, The (11 page)

But in this life, which I then created, I did not dream an effective dream. I was in Haber's office, all right, and I dreamed; but it didn't change anything. It's been this way all along, and I merely had a bad dream about the Plague Years. There's nothing wrong with me; I don't need therapy.

He had never looked at it this way before, and it amused him enough that he grinned, but not particularly happily.

He knew he would dream again.

It was already past two. He washed up, found his raincoat (real cotton, a luxury in the other life), and set off on foot to the Institute, a couple of miles' walk, up past the Medical School and then farther up, into Washington Park. He could have got there by the trolleys, of course, but they were sporadic and roundabout, and anyhow there was no rush. It was pleasant, passing through the warm March rain, the unbustling streets; the trees were leafing out, the chestnuts ready to light their candles.

The Crash, the carcinomic plague which had reduced human population by five billion in five years, and another billion in the next ten, had shaken the civilizations of the world to their roots and yet left them, in the end, intact. If had not changed anything radically: only quantitatively.

The air was still profoundly and irremediably polluted: that pollution predated the Crash by decades, indeed was its direct cause. It didn't harm anybody much now, except the newborn. The Plague, in its leukemoid variety, still selectively, thoughtfully as it were, picked off one out of four babies born and killed it within six months. Those who survived were virtually cancer-resistant. But there are other griefs.

No factories spewed smoke, down by the river. No cars ran fouling the air with exhaust; what few there were, were steamers or battery-powered.

There were no songbirds any more, either.

The effects of the Plague were visible in everything, it was itself still endemic, and yet it hadn't prevented war from breaking out. In fact the fighting in the Near East was more savage than it had been in the more crowded world. The U.S. was heavily committed to the Israeli-Egyptian side in weapons, munitions, planes, and "military advisers" by the regiment. China was in equally deep on the Iraq-Iran side, though she hadn't yet sent in Chinese soldiers, only Tibetans, North Koreans, Vietnamese, and Mongolians. Russia and India were holding uneasily aloof; but now that Afghanistan and Brazil were going in with the Iranians, Pakistan might jump in on the Isragypt side. India would then panic and line up with China, which might scare the USSR enough to push her in on the U.S.

side. This gave a line-up of twelve Nuclear Powers in all, six to a side. So went the speculations. Meanwhile Jerusalem was rubble, and in Saudi Arabia and Iraq the civilian population was living in burrows in the ground while tanks and planes sprayed fire in the air and cholera in the water, and babies crawled out of the burrows blinded by napalm.

They were still massacring whites in Johannesburg, Orr noticed on a headline at a corner newspaper stand. Years now since the Uprising, and there were still whites to massacre in South Africa! People are tough. . . .

The rain fell warm, polluted, gentle on his bare head as he climbed the gray hills of Portland.

In the office with the great corner window that looked out into the rain, he said, "Please, stop using my dreams to improve things, Dr. Haber. It won't work. It's wrong. I want to be cured."

"That's the one essential prerequisite to your cure, George! Wanting it."

"You're not answering me."

But the big man was like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality, belief, response, infinite layers, no end to them, no center to him. Nowhere that he ever stopped, had to stop, had to say Here I stay! No being, only layers.

"You're using my effective dreams to change the world. You won't admit to me that you're doing it. Why not?"

"George, you must realize that you ask questions which from your point of view may seem reasonable, but which from my point of view are literally unanswerable. We don't see reality the same way."

"Near enough the same to be able to talk."

"Yes. Fortunately. But not always to be able to ask and answer. Not yet."

"I can answer your questions, and I do. . . . But anyway: look. You can't go on changing things, trying to run things."

"You speak as if that were some kind of general moral imperative." He looked at Orr with his genial, reflective smile, stroking his beard. "But in fact, isn't that man's very purpose on earth--to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?"

"No!"

"What is his purpose, then?"

"I don't know. Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."

There was a slight pause, and when Haber answered his tone was no longer genial, reassuring, or encouraging. It was quite neutral and verged, just detectably, on contempt.

"You're of a peculiarly passive outlook for a man brought up in the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West. A sort of natural Buddhist. Have you ever studied the Eastern mysticisms, George?" The last question, with its obvious answer, was an open sneer.

"No. I don't know anything about them. I do know that it's wrong to force the pattern of things. It won't do. It's been our mistake for a hundred years. Don't you--don't you see what happened yesterday?"

The opaque, dark eyes met his, straight on.

"What happened yesterday, George?"

No way. No way out.

Haber was using sodium pentothal on him now, to lower his resistance to hypnotic procedures. He submitted to the shot, watching the needle slip with only a moment of pain into the vein of his arm. This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.

Haber went off somewhere to run something while the drug took effect; but he was back promptly in fifteen minutes, gusty, jovial, and indifferent. "All right! Let's get on with it, George!"

Orr knew, with dreary clarity, what he would get on with today: the war. The papers were full of it, even Orr's news-resistant mind had been full of it, coming here. The growing war in the Near East. Haber would end it. And no doubt the killings in Africa.

For Haber was a benevolent man. He wanted to make the world better for humanity.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means. Orr lay back on the couch and shut his eyes. The hand touched his throat, "You will enter the hypnotic state now, George," said Haber's deep voice. "You are. . . ."

dark.

In the dark.

Not quite night yet: late twilight on the fields. Clumps of trees looked black and moist.

The road he was walking on picked up the faint, last light from the sky; it ran long and straight, an old country highway, cracked blacktop. A goose was walking ahead of him, about fifteen feet in advance and visible only as a white, bobbing blur. Now and then it hissed a little.

The stars were coming out, white as daisies. A big one was blooming just to the right of the road, low over the dark country, tremulously white. When he looked up at it again it had already become larger and brighter. It's enhuging, he thought. It seemed to grow reddish as it brightened. It enreddenhuged. The eyes swam. Small blue-green streaks zipped about it zigzagging Brownian round-ianroundian. A vast and creamy halo pulsated about big star and tiny zips, fainter, clearer, pulsing. Oh no no no! he said as the big star brightened hugendly BURST blinding. He fell to the ground, covering his head with his arms as the sky burst into streaks of bright death, but could not turn onto his face, must behold and witness. The ground swung up and down, great trembling wrinkles passing through the skin of Earth. "Let be, let be!" he screamed aloud with his face against the sky, and woke on the leather couch.

He sat up, and put his face in his sweaty, shaking hands.

Presently he felt Haber's hand heavy on his shoulder. "Bad time again? Damn, I thought I'd let you off easy. Told you to have a dream about peace."

"I did."

"But it was disturbing to you?"

"I was watching a battle in space."

"Watching it? From where?"

"Earth." He recounted the dream briefly, omitting the goose. "I don't know whether they got one of ours or we got one of theirs."

Haber laughed. "I wish we could see what goes on out there! We'd feel more involved.

But of course those encounters take place at speeds and distances that human vision simply isn't equipped to keep up with. Your version's a lot more picturesque than the actuality, no doubt. Sounds like a good science-fiction movie from the seventies. Used to go to those when I was a kid. . . . But why do you think you dreamed up a battle scene when the suggestion was peace?"

"Just peace? Dream about peace--that's all you said?"

Haber did not answer at once. He occupied himself with the controls of the Augmentor.

"O.K.," he said at last. "This once, experimentally, let's let you compare the suggestion with the dream. Perhaps we'll find out why it came out negative. I said--no, let's run the tape." He went over to a panel in the wall.

"You tape the whole session?"

"Sure. Standard psychiatric practice. Didn't you know?"

How could I know if it's hidden, makes no noise signal, and you didn't tell me, Orr thought; but he said nothing. Maybe it was standard practice, maybe it was Haber's personal arrogance; but in either case he couldn't do much about it.

"Here we are, it ought to be about here. The hypnotic state now, George. You are--Here!

Don't go under, George!" The tape hissed. Orr shook his head and blinked. The last fragments of sentences had been Haber's voice on the tape, of course; and he was still full of the hypnosis-inducing drug.

"I'll have to skip a bit. All right." Now it was his voice on the tape again, saying, "--

peace. No more mass killing of humans by other humans. No fighting in Iran and Arabia and Israel. No more genocides in Africa. No stockpiles of nuclear and biological weapons, ready to use against other nations. No more research on ways and means of killing people. A world at peace with itself. Peace as a universal life-style on Earth. You will dream of that world at peace with itself. Now you're going to sleep. When I say--"

He stopped the tape abruptly, lest he put Orr to sleep with the key word.

Orr rubbed his forehead. "Well," he said, "I followed instructions."

"Hardly. To dream of a battle in cislunar space--" Haber stopped as abruptly as the tape.

"Cislunar," Orr said, feeling a little sorry for Haber. "We weren't using that word, when I went to sleep. How are things in Isragypt?"

The made-up word from the old reality had a curiously shocking effect, spoken in this reality: like surrealism, it seemed to make sense and didn't, or seemed not to make sense and did.

Haber walked up and down the long, handsome room. Once he passed his hand over his red-brown, curly beard. The gesture was a calculated one and familiar to Orr, but when he spoke Orr felt that he was seeking and choosing his words carefully, not trusting, for once, to his inexhaustible fund of improvisation. "It's curious that you used the Defense of Earth as a symbol or metaphor of peace, of the end of warfare. Yet it's not unfitting.

Only very subtle. Dreams are endlessly subtle. Endlessly. For in fact it was that threat, that immediate peril of invasion by noncommunicating, reasonlessly hostile aliens, which forced us to stop fighting among ourselves, to turn our aggressive-defensive energies outward, to extend the territorial drive to include all humanity, to combine our weapons against a common foe. If the Aliens hadn't struck, who knows? We might, actually, still be fighting in the Near East."

"Out of the frying pan into the fire," Orr said. "Don't you see, Dr. Haber, that that's all you'll ever get from me? Look, it's not that I want to block you, to frustrate your plans.

Ending the war was a good idea, I agree with it totally. I even voted Isolationist last election because Harris promised to pull us out of the Near East. But I guess I can't, or my subconscious can't, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you're trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it's easier to conceive of than the motives of war. But you're handling something outside reason.

You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?"

Haber said nothing, and showed no reaction, so Orr went on.

"Or maybe it's not just my unconscious, irrational mind, maybe it's my total self, my whole being, that just isn't right for the job. I'm too defeatist, or passive, as you said, maybe. I don't have enough desires. Maybe that has something to do with my having this

--this capacity to dream effectively; but if it doesn't, there might be others who can do it, people with minds more like your own, that you could work with better. You could test for it; I can't be the only one; maybe I just happened to become aware of it. But I don't want to do it. I want to get off the hook. I can't take it. I mean, look: all right, the war's been over in the Near East for six years, fine, but now there are the Aliens, up on the Moon. What if they land? What kind of monsters have you dredged up out of my unconscious mind, in the name of peace? I don't even know!"

"Nobody knows what the Aliens look like, George," Haber said, in a reasonable, reassuring tone. "We all have our bad dreams about 'em, God knows! But as you said, it's been over six years now since their first landing on the Moon, and they still haven't made it to Earth. By now, our missile defense systems are completely efficient. There's no reason to think they'll break through now, if they haven't yet. The danger period was during those first few months, before the Defense was mobilized on an international cooperative basis."